CyPosium – the book is published by Link Editions, in partnership with La Panacée, Montpellier, as part of “Open”, a series of catalogues, essay collections and pamphlets co-published with partner institutions. It is available as a print-on-demand paperback, e-book and downloadable PDF.

CyPosium – the book presents selected material from the CyPosium, a one-day online symposium organised in October 2012 to discuss cyberformance. Artists from a range of backgrounds have experimented in this field for as long as they have had access to the internet, and the CyPosium sought to remember and celebrate some of this ephemeral and pioneering work.The 12-hour event consisted of online presentations and facilitated discussions, and attracted an audience from around the world who engaged in a lively, vibrant real-time conversation.CyPosium – the book continues and expands on this discussion by presenting texts, chat log excerpts, discussion transcripts, edited email conversations, creative chat excerpt essays and illustrations from the event, along with responses to the event.

CyPosium – the book will be of interest to practitioners, students and researchers of digital and online arts. While its focus is live performance, the contributors hail from a wide range of practice both online and offline, and their writing illustrates the hybrid nature of contemporary arts involving digital technologies. Music, dance, poetry, sound art and the visual arts all feature, as well as entertainment and social practices such as computer games, virtual worlds and online dating. Common themes that emerged during the CyPosium are also present in the book, such as the changing role of the audience; intimacy in the online environment; and mortality. This breadth of form and content reflects the ever-increasing ubiquity of the internet and digital technologies in our daily lives as well as our arts practices.

Two people will create together an image of touch using webcams. Under physical constraints of the used technology, which recalls those suffered by our body during daily computer use, they will touch each other in a vacuum. The public can see both, the created image in a video projection of two webcams and the two bodies positioned in space resembling living sculptures and minimal dance.
Streaming: Ivan Chabannaud mosaika.tv

In 2009 I started the artistic research project Huis Clos / No Exit. In this project I use a specially developed interface to unite several people remotely in a shared performance space that becomes subsequently both a laboratory and a playground. The performance experiences using this interface, suggest that today’s intimacy is no longer revealed through private images but through behaviour captured in real time interactions.

Nowadays, people use webcams to film themselves and to express their ideas and feelings to the unknown other that will look at their videoblog. People rarely use their web- or phonecam to talk to someone else. The use of Skype is either very business like or restricted to family members. In Internet applications as Chatroulette people rarely exchange more than a glance. What they look for is their alter ego or an opportunity.
In her book “Alone Together” Sherry Turkle [1] describes how we hide more and more behind technology, how intimate communications start being something to avoid rather than to look for, how smartphones help us to flee our fear for the other, how we learn to control our relations via interfaces and how we are adapting our behaviour to this new situation.
Facebook teaches us how to simulate intimacy, how to make relations easy, clean, and without danger. At the same time these relations also become superficial and makes us ask: Who are we when we don’t perform? Why can’t we show our vulnerable, messy sides? Why can’t I be boring and cherish solitude anymore?
In a society where authenticy and privacy become endangered it is important to find ways to access our vulnerabilities and doubts, to make them public, to cherish our messy side, to make place for the beast in the beauty, to go back to reality, to claim the human.

In 1998 I worked with at least 8 other French artists, I never met, on a collaborative website called lieudit.org . The site and the collective died in 2000 but I still have very nice memories of for instance our IRC rendez-vous during the launches of the virtual exhibitions we organised. Collaborating in a shared website was very stimulating, but in the end we couldn’t find a common goal to make us negotiate better our differences and so we split up. It was very frustrating to learn that behind our machines we couldn’t overcome these political and philosophical and emotional differences, that problems were exaggerated and stayed insurmountable.

This was the first time I noticed that collaboration using machine wasn’t easier, maybe not more difficult either, but different from ordinary face to face communication. Later experiences with online collaborative creation interfaces as for instance Furtherfield’s VisistorsStudio confirmed this.

So when in the early 2000 people started talking, dreaming and glorifying the advantages of Internet collaborations, I was very doubtful and somewhat vexed and decided to start thinking about how to use the recently developed streaming interface of panoplie.org for working on these problems. (1)

In telematic performances intimacy is not there where you think it is. The Big Kiss performed with Mark River (of MTAA) in New York in 2007 [2] might have looked as an intimate performance, but in fact it was closer to a “drawing à deux” session than to a real kiss. (even if it did awake intimate feelings as drawing on paper of a kiss might have done too). In the telematic performance “One the puppet of the other” with Nicolas Frespech (Paris 2007) [3], we felt most intimate, most close together when we didn’t exchange, when we were waiting, when nothing happened.

In 2008 I started Huis Clos / No Exit : A networked performance series investigating collaboration at a distance – the project was also about relational dynamics in a dispersed group. [4] With an interface developed by Clément Charmet (panoplie.org) and Estelle Senay (x-réseaux – Théâtre Paris Villette) I could unite the images and sounds of the webcams of up to 6 participating performers in a mosaic. The physically separated performers could share borders and interaction surfaces in a common virtual space and become co-responsible for the mosaic image projected in front of the public during performances. At all times they had this same mosaic image on their screen.

A first experiment took place in November 2008 in the International Laboratory Interactive digital media on stage organized by NU2’s in L’Animal a l’Esquena, in Celrà, Spain. In one of the tests I asked three performers to execute a protocol that stated that, before leaving the performance interface they were to compliment the others after having insulted them. It was strange and beautiful to see how they couldn’t stop complimenting and saying nice things to another. Later I became more and more aware of how the performance interface, besides allowing observation of behaviour in collaboration and auto-organisation, can also reveal private, intimate behaviour to the public. The cyberperformers are so occupied by their interactions, that they don’t have time to negotiate their image as they mostly do on the Internet.

I talked about machine-mediated revelation of intimacy in an interview with Maria Chatzichristodoulou published in Digimag in Oct 2010. [5]

“I always look for situations that make any attempt at escaping from exposure impossible. In general I do not rehearse my pieces. If this is necessary –for instance, due to technical reasons­– I write new protocols for the final performance. I try to find ways to penetrate the other performer –just for a second I want them to expose themselves to me (and to our observers) in an action, or a response, that is out of their control. I want them to unveil something they usually hide or only disclose in situations of complete trust, of complete intimacy. I want to know how they function, not by them telling me, but by me almost forcing them to reveal an instance of their ‘hidden code’ in public. I want us to go beyond self-representation and the control that this requires. Am I really forcing them to do this?… No I am not. What happens is that the situation in itself –that is, the telematic performance interface, the protocols, the flaws in the streaming connections– rewrites the conditionsof communication in a way that makes this revelation possible, if not inevitable.”

Because I think we need to counterbalance the tendencies to make our Internet-mediated relations cleaner, faster and more and more secure I started paraphrasing Rancière “The real needs to be trapped in order to be available for thought”. [6] (2)

Notes

(1) From 2006 – 2009 I organised with panoplie.org the Breaking Solitude and later the Double Bind webperformance series . While they started out as performances around the idea of the internet as a public space of solitude they became more and more involved with experimenting “different ways of being together” What can we share, what do we share, how are we interacting and what is this technology doing to us? http://2008.panoplie.org/2008.panoplie.org/#//DoubleBind

(2) Because the Huis Clos / No Exit interface makes people film their own image, a collaborative cyberformance using it can also be staged as a live production of an autonomous video, available for reflexion. http://bram.org/huisclos/toutvabien/indexang.html

References

[1] Sherry Turkle, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other” (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

Lunch Bites is a series of hour-long lunchtime conversations, hosted in Space 7, Culture Lab at Newcastle University, featuring local and visiting thinkers and creators.

Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria X) will be presenting “Allergic to Utopias: The work of Annie Abrahams“, followed by Christopher Newell’s “Silence, sounds and slips – enhanced communication through miscommunication”.

Like this:

“My thinking is more about communication: about, on the one hand, the desire of being close with someone and, on the other, the necessity of restricting one’s openness, of closing oneself, of retreating from intimacy. …Maybe a performance is for me, as an artist, what an article is to a scientific researcher –that is, a way to make public, to share, something that you think is important for other people to know about or to feel. … I hate politics. I prefer action”

Interview NET ART by Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka Maria X], Lecturer in Theatre and Performance – School of Arts and New Media -The University of Hull @ Scarborough, for Digimag 58

Like this:

“Abrahams talked to us about fragmented intimacies, shared absences, the frustrations of mediated communication, broken relationships, desperate attempts to achieve connectivity, the body lost in digital space, distance, painful and erotic lack. Life, as it is, today, in the networks.”

Article by Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka Maria X], Lecturer in Theatre and Performance – School of Arts and New Media -The University of Hull @ Scarborough, for Digimag 54, May 2010